1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a document filing system, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method for page-retrieval using an electronic-book display employed in the system.
2. Related Art
Today's document filing systems feature a page-retrieval function which use an electronic-book display, and the page-retrieval function has steadily been improved.
Japanese Laid-open Patent Application No. 2-181864 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,146,600 disclose inventions which take into account the display frequency of the viewed objects. The number of times a key word is displayed or printed is determined. When a relation between the number of display times or the number of prints meets a predetermined condition, the two numbers are displayed on a screen. However, the numbers are referred to only to determine which documents are to be saved or not. Only the numbers are displayed, with no relative indication being given. Thus, the number of display times is not shown collectively for all the retrieved items, nor does the user have a convenient, graphical illustration of the relative frequency of displays. A page retrieval based upon the relative display frequencies for the pages has not yet been developed.
Japanese Laid-open Patent Application No. 1-278170 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,146,600 disclose inventions which take into account the display frequency: the number of display times and that for print-out are counted per page and when a relation between these two numbers meets a predetermined condition, such a description is displayed. However, the description is referred only to determine which documents are to be saved and which are not. Thus, the number of display times per page is shown neither collectively nor illustratively for the use of the page-retrieval, and the page-retrieval based on the display frequency has not been realized yet.